Determination of the fuzzy measures for multicriteria and optimal design of a building façade using Choquet integrals

Abstract Building facade design procedures are very complex due to the necessity of providing a balance between all necessary functions of the system. Although facades have a significant impact on overall building performance and the comfort level of occupants, their design and detailing is not receiving enough attention. Presently, most designers tend to use design methods that are optimized with respect to only a few objectives. The trend towards designing high performance and sustainable buildings is prompting designers to adopt better optimization methods for striking a balance between required performance attributes. Therefore, application of multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods is receiving increased attention in the building design process. Currently-used MCDM methods cannot account for the interdependence among decision criteria, implicitly assuming that they are mutually independent. However, in practical applications interactions do exist and cannot be neglected. Application of the Choquet integral solves this problem and avoids double-counting in the decision-making process when interactions are present. However, determining the required fuzzy measures used for assigning weights to each subset of decision criteria is not an easy task, especially in fields where the application of MCDM methods is relatively new, such as the construction industry and for designing building envelopes. This paper will introduce a Choquet-based design approach as well as feasible methods to extract the fuzzy measures for designing exterior walls and building facades.